Welcome to the place to inform and educate yourself about safe internet dating

Hi. This is somewhat like a warning and also a call to action to you, my dear reader.

Please,don’t be fooled or lulled into a sense of security to think that romance scams have waned, or have stopped. Many, many people are being scammed daily. The rate at which young guys and girls go for these scams is alarming, and really, the society in Nigeria is helpless. Young undergraduates use their time and learning to do nothing but scam in order to make money. And when they succeed, they flaunt their wealth. Let me cite a few recent instances:

1. I marketed a particular property to a middle aged woman. she called her friend on phone to get her son interested in buying the property. Later on, after dropping the call, she told me that the boy just bought an SUV worth $80,000 and is a full yahoo boy. Was I stunned? I later learnt that the boy got proceeds in excess of $250,000 in May.

2. I showed a property to a lawyer 2 saturdays ago. He came in around 8.30am in the money through another agent to inspect. At 2.30pm, he came back with the client to inspect When he came out of the car, he turned out to be a young man of around 25 years in age. I had to allow him inspect. After he left, I asked questions from the person that brought the lawyer and he told me the guy is a yahoo boy, looking to buy a house.The house in question is around $200,000. And he was paying cash, though he didn’t like the one we showed him.

I have heard various stories of young boys and girls in their early 20’s painting the town red, spending the money they scammed from others. And they are fleecing people of tens of thousands of dollars daily. Please be aware that these guys are on the prowl and are scamming people all over. Don’t leave or give out any details that might come back to haunt you. If you have compromised your vital information, it’s better to own up and make the necessary corrections. If you know anyone living in denial, you might want to direct them to such a blog as this or other reputable ones.

I hope one day, these guys can be brought to justice. Till then, please be careful online. Looking for love and affection online is right, but don’t lose all you have in the process.

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A fraudster nicknamed Fizzy for his love of champagne who conned £30 million from up to 400 victims was jailed for eight years at the Old Bailey.

For seven years Frank Onyeachonam, 38, ran the UK operation of a global scam which was orchestrated from his native Nigeria.

He extracted anything from £2,000 to £600,000 from the life savings of vulnerable pensioners to fund his millionaire’s lifestyle by persuading them to send him money to release “winnings” from a bogus lottery.

He loved to be photographed surrounded by cash and champagne bubbly in West End nightclubs, drove Porsches and Maseratis and filled his Thames-side flat with Gucci, Armani and Louis Vuitton.

Onyeachonam was convicted of conspiracy to defraud.

Lawrencia Emenyonu, 38, and Bernard Armah, 51, both of Wood Green, were found guilty of money laundering and jailed for 18 months and eight months respectively.
Sentencing Judge Rebecca Poulet QC described Onyeachonam as having “arrogance that’s unbelievable” and the victims suffering “great hardship.”

“The evidence against you was so strong it is almost preposterous at times that you should suggest it was not your responsibility,” she said.

“Yours was the leading role in the fraud. It was a very well thought out operation, sophisticated in its planning and execution .

“It persisted with you at the helm for eight years. You targeted individuals because they were elderly and likely to agree and be tricked by these scams.

“The harm you caused was not only high in terms of the financial losses to your victims but in the dreadful impact you had on their lives and in terms of their mental capacity and relationships with their families.”

Their simple plan – known as an advance fee fraud – involved Onyeachonam sending emails announcing that each victim had won millions of pounds on a non-existent Australian lottery and requesting a charge to release their winnings.

The court heard that investigators had traced 14 victims – mainly from the US but including one from Britain – who were defrauded of a total of around £900,000.

But detectives believe the true figure is considerably higher.

Although Onyeachonam was the key figure in the UK, a co-conspirator abroad was arrested with the details of more than 100,000 potential victims.
Onyeachonam started the scam soon after arriving in the UK in 2005 and continued – even on bail after his arrest in 2011 – to 2012.

He was finally trapped in a three-year operation by the National Crime Agency assisted by the US authorities.

Steve Brown, senior officer in the NCA’s cyber-crime unit, said Onyeachonam’s victims were selected from a database known as a “suckers list” of susceptible targets which he had marked with ranking s such as “cripple” or “elderly” or just “poor”.

“Victims were sent an email from an alias used by Onyeachonam saying they had won an Australian lottery,” he said.

“They would be directed to ring him and he would say ‘if you send me money I will then release your lottery funds’.”

“Once they’ve got their claws into someone they won’t stop. As long as they keep sending them money they will keep going until there’s nothing left.”

Mr Brown said the scam had inflicted a “mental wreck” on the victims, stripping their life’s savings, forcing them to sell their homes and leaving them isolated from their friends and families.

Emails showed victims pleaded with Onyeachonam to send them money to pay for healthcare, while some died before he could be brought to justice.

One victim described how the scam made her feel like she had been “raped over and over again”.

Onyeachonam was the key figure in the “UK nexus” of an international enterprise run by a mastermind or “chairman” of the network who is based in Lagos and under investigation by the African authorities.

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Hundreds lose cash, some up to US$250,000, as Malaysia becomes base for African scammers

Hundreds of foreign women are being ripped off by internet romance scammers based in Malaysia, some losing up to US$250,000, as the country becomes an epicentre for online crime perpetrated by Africans.

US officials said the mostly Nigerian conmen, who enter Malaysia on student visas, were taking advantage of the country’s good internet infrastructure to prey on lonely, middle-aged women, wooing them on dating websites.The scams are more sophisticated than most Nigeria-based operations, and are helped by Malaysia’s advanced banking system.

The victims are mostly American. US officials say Malaysian police lack the resources and expertise to tackle the problem and have yet to launch a single prosecution of a case involving a US victim.

Malaysian police were reported by local media last December as saying that the number of internet scam cases more than doubled last year with total losses of more than US$11 million. A total of 476 Africans had been apprehended for suspected involvement, the report said.

Tim Scherer, consul general at the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur, said complaints about such scams now made up more than 80 per cent of inquiries, with a dozen new cases reported every week.

Australians, Canadians and Europeans were also targets.

“These are not rich widows who are being preyed on. These are middle-class Americans who don’t have this kind of money to spare,” Scherer said. “It can really transform their lives in a very terrible way.”

The US embassy estimated that US victims were losing several million dollars a year, with two women in the past 12 months losing more than US$250,000 each. There were more than 600 cases a year, and the amount lost by each victim averaged in the tens of thousands of dollars, it said. The actual figure of total losses was probably far higher, Scherer said, because many victims were embarrassed to come forward.

The highly sophisticated scammers often groomed victims for months. Large teams typically trawl dating or Christian websites, pretending to be a Western man who then gets into legal or business difficulties in Muslim-majority Malaysia.

A 59-year-old widow from Arizona said she had transferred US$260,000 to Malaysia. “Charles” – who claimed to love her – said he was being prevented from returning to the US by Malaysian bureaucracy which wanted hefty payments to negotiate. She went heavily into debt, and even flew to Malaysia to meet him. He never showed up, but a European woman claiming to be his lawyer managed to get another US$25,000 from her.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Lonely women pay dearly for web ‘romances’

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About

Hi. I am Alan Prince. I created this blog in order to give you the very latest news and updates on romance scams and also, to let you know how you can date safely on the internet. Scams affect many lives. They cause pain, hurt and damages, financially, emotionally and in other areas of our lives.

I invite you to read through as many posts on this site as you can, then share it with your friends and loved ones on twitter,facebook and so on using the share buttons after each article. You can also direct people who are being scammed to this site to read the stories of others, and avoid being hurt. If you have lost to the scams, you will find help in the stories of people like you who were also scammed. Let’s join hands together to help others and defeat this menace on the internet. You never know whose life you could save just by directing someone you know to read this site. Cheers.

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